My cousin and his wife, who is black, visited with me for several days this past Spring. We used the DC metro system a good bit. I suggested two stops on the way home, where there are many restaurants and shops. The second stop was downtown Silver Spring, Maryland. I had not been there in a while. There’s heavy vehicle and foot traffic as you walk the few blocks to approach the entrance of the pedestrian-only main street of restaurants and shops. Along the way I expected to see a heavy mix of blacks. When you reach the street, from the corner you can see all the way up the crowded street. As soon as we did, my cousin’s wife was so startled by what we saw, that she said out loud what I was thinking: “Wow. There certainly are a lot of people of color.”
There certainly were. It was ninety percent black. It was so out of whack, so out of proportion to the general population and neighborhood and even to Washington DC where we spent much of the day, that it startled the three of us, though my cousin would die before he said anything. We walked up the street to see about two dozen young black kids, who were surrounded by adults, playing in the water fountains like they were at the beach. As we walked back down the packed street to get out of there, I noticed that ninety percent of the people sitting and dining at the fenced-in sidewalk restaurant tables were white. Yet the dense crowd occupying the street was nearly all black.

It was two separate and distinct peoples who, while at peace, seem to instinctively divvy up the space into default positions.

LA replies:

I’m not sure what your point is.

Buck replies:

It was a thought brought to mind by Rule 10(r): “When it comes to your social survival you should pretend to be unconscious of blackness. If someone says, “There are a lot of blacks in the park today,” the safest response is, “Really? I hadn’t noticed.” Which is essentially what I did that day.

We were all startled by the near total blackness of the street crowd, but my cousin’s black wife was free to announce it out loud. Had I, a white man, noted with such surprise that the street was nearly all black, I would have been seen as racist for noticing it and for announcing that I noticed it. But a black women has every right, in the eyes of both blacks and whites. Imagine if a handful of black savages had heard me say that. I need to protect myself. I can’t risk making blacks angry, certainly not when I’m outnumbered a hundred to one. I have to remain politically correct. As Terry Morris put it, I had to “pretend to be unconscious of blackness.”

And the idea that the two crowds seem separate; that the whites were dining in the restaurants and the blacks “controlled” the street. It wasn’t a comfortable place to be. All three us knew immediately that we wanted to leave.

LA replies:

Yes, now I understand you. A white person is forbidden to make any observation about blacks that is (a) critical, or (b) neutral. To say, “There are a lot of black people here” could be seen either as neutral, or as implicitly critical. So it is prohibited.

- end of initial entry -

Paul K. writes:

You wrote, “A white person is forbidden to make any observation about blacks that is (a) critical, or (b) neutral. To say, ‘There are a lot of black people here’ could be seen either as neutral, or as implicitly critical. So it is prohibited.”

I believe that any white person, no matter how liberal, understands that “a lot of black people here” is not a good thing for white people, so if another white person comments on it, it’s understood to be critical.

Sage McLaughlin writes:

To Paul K.’s point I would add that there must never arise any suggestion that a non-white majority is anything other than the default, normal state of affairs, no matter where one might be. To remark on the blackness of a given place is to suggest that it might have been otherwise. This is not an acceptable thought.

This is related to the tiresome sneering one hears in casual conversation, particularly among white people trying to impress one another, about “lily white” towns and neighborhoods. The phrase “lily white” is understood to be strictly pejorative, and one usually hears it spit out rather than spoken. (Note that nobody ever speaks in negative terms about a neighborhood being “jet black.”) Thus if a person remarks that a place has a remarkable proportion of non-whites, the suggestion arises that this is somehow worthy of mention, rather than being the normal, healthy state of affairs in any respectable community. In pretending not to notice such things, we are pretending that being alone in a sea of non-white faces is what every white person ought to expect at all times, no matter what country, state, town, or city block he happens to be in.

Now, this is obviously very stupid, since whites are still the majority population in every Western country, and still live principally among themselves, but it is the way most people talk. I have found that many such people, especially those who are young, are actually quite open to correction on this point when it’s handled firmly, because there really is no rational justification for it. Most people don’t like to think of themselves as PC-whipped cowards and group-thinkers, preferring rather to make believe that their liberalism is a daring and courageous thing. They especially don’t like being accused of hating a particular race for no good reason, even if it is the white race (which is why the professor who got a lot of attention a while back for stating forthrightly that “the white race must be destroyed” tried so vigorously to backpedal and spin his way out of the plain and obvious meaning of his words). So what I do more and more is to speak plainly, without becoming agitated, and like some of your correspondents I have found that many people in the secret counsel of their hearts know the real score.